Zazzle Letterpress Design Guidelines

Letterpress  offers a wonderful, tactile dimension to your products. However, achieving a beautiful result when combining this traditional process with modern digital printing requires careful attention to technical limitations and specifications.

Following this guide is crucial to avoid non-approved products, print issues, delays, and unexpected results.

Understanding Core Letterpress Concepts

Letterpress is very different from digital printing. It's similar to a traditional book-press, where an etched plate (die), coated in ink, is pressed into the paper.

• The pressure creates a slight impression (a depression) in the paper where the raised areas of the plate have compressed the fibers. **Please consider that there might be a slight impression on the back of the card for digital design elements you add there. 
• The ink is deposited directly into the paper fibers by this pressing action.

Solid Ink Coverage (Avoiding Mottling)

Letterpress works best with controlled use of ink.

Visual Example: The inverted design on the left is too large a solid area (will mottle). The variation on the right will work much better.

Photographic and Continuous-Tone Elements

Letterpress cannot reproduce the subtle variations of photography and gradients.

• Incompatibility: Photographic elements and continuous-tone graphics (like gradients) are fundamentally incompatible with letterpress and will result in lost or inconsistent detail.
• Halftones: Even with halftone filters, subtle details will be lost.
• Rule: Do not use photograph templates or elements with tonal variations for any letterpress parts of your design; they will be rejected.
• Digital Exception: Digital photographic elements are acceptable only if you maintain clear separation from all letterpress elements (see Alignment below).

Digital and Letterpress Alignment (Registration)

Combining two separate printing processes makes perfect alignment challenging. We must expect a registration tolerance of 1/16th to 1/8th of an inch.

• Mandatory Gutter: To guarantee a quality result, you must create an empty space, or Gutter, of at least 1/8th inch (3mm) wide between all letterpress and digital elements. No overlaps are permitted.  
  • In the design tool, if you create a line with a border setting of 9pt, this is the size of the gap you’ll want to maintain between Letterpress and Digital elements.

Visual Example: Demonstrates a digital floral element (CMYK) and a letterpress 'Z' (blue).

• Leftmost 'Z': Elements overlap (will fail).
• Middle 'Z': Has a 1/16th inch gutter (acceptable but risky).
• Rightmost 'Z': Has a 1/8th inch gutter (mandatory/safe).
  [Image showing three versions of a floral pattern with a 'Z' in the center, illustrating overlap, a small gutter, and the required 1/8th inch gutter.]

Minimum Detail and Line Weights

Extremely fine or dense elements won’t produce consistent results. Fine details may reproduce, but do not expect a perfect, identical reproduction on every card.

• Line Weights: We recommend using line or stroke weights of 0.5pt or thicker for best results.
• Patterns: Stick to line screen patterns with frequencies below 30 LPI (lines per inch).

Example: Fine detail with good spacing can still work, but be aware of minor flaws and slight loss of the finest lines compared to the source image.

Typography and Font Selection

The limitations of fine detail are especially important for text, as bridging of letters and loss of detail (especially in script typefaces) is common.

• Size: The absolute lower limit is 8pt, but 9pt or 10pt is considered quite small and safer.
• Style: Use larger, bolder typefaces.
• Spacing: Use wider tracking/kerning to help separate characters and yield better results.
• Text Blocks: Keep text to shorter phrases and sentences; paragraphs of text are better as a digital element.
• Avoid: Distressed fonts (ironically, they don't press well).

Color Offering

We’ve collected a set of swatches which may be useful in matching your letterpress and digital color elements. It’s important to mention that the actual letterpress ink may not match these exactly, but these should be very close.

Orientation 

An additional step that will make your designs to be shown to best, is to restrict the Orientation option to the orientation you designed in. We want for you to have the freedom to design in any orientation, but where with most products, customers would be able to enter the design experience to adjust things. Because of the complexity of Letterpress, they won’t have access to this so we’ll want to limit all designs to “This orientation only.” This will be a requirement for designs to be approved. 

Your templates will ensure that letterpress elements will not overlap digital color elements, typographic issues are resolved with templated text, fine-line details and spacing are meticulously handled, and letterpress photo/tonal elements are minimized or omitted as needed. This thoughtful approach will make it easier for customers to personalize your designs and enjoy the process.
 

Conclusion: The Principle of Restraint

The core principle for successful letterpress design is restraint. Maximize your impact by focusing on simple, elegant designs with large, bold typography and controlled use of solid areas. Intricate, ornamental, or fine-lined pieces will likely be lost or rejected.

Quick Reference: Required Minimum Specifications

Here is a summary of the critical technical specifications and rules for Zazzle Letterpress + Digital designs:

Keep this guidance in mind and you're going to have an excellent time designing for Zazzle Letterpress!